Perchance to Dream

The deep blue sky with its flotilla of puffy white fair weather cumulus clouds gave the pack into Johns Brook Lodge an uncannily submarine feeling, as cloud shadows drifted through the woods all around us, brightening and darkening this section of forest and that, popping a section of trail into view with flashbulb suddenness, extinguishing it with a falling curtain sweep. The clouds moved with the slow steadiness of a gentle surf, turning the treetops from light green to dark, the sky from deep blue to blindingly white, shimmering the landscape in slow motion.

Despite all the rain this spring the trail seemed drier than I ever experienced it, and for the first time ever we packed all the way into Johns Brook Lodge without my deploying any bug dope whatsoever, possibly, I theorized, because the black flies drowned en masse in the ubiquitous floods.

Their brain pans fried in the eighty degree heat, low humidity and high pressure, the red-eyed vireos held forth from all directions, calling incessantly, punctuating the soft rustle of leaves in the breeze with their shrill, screechy monotone monologues.

We made it in to our reserved lean-to in a little more than two hours, set up camp and had a lovely dinner of orzo with sun-dried tomatoes, sautéed garlic and toasted pine nuts, and then we enjoyed a nightcap and drifted off into one of those luxuriously exhausted sleeps.

But then I woke up, abruptly, my heart pounding furiously away in my chest, a little before midnight. As I breathed deeply in and out trying to understand my terror, trying to remember if something had just woken me up, it occurred to me that I had obviously regressed into my old habit of fearing bears inordinately, no doubt, I knew, because of the time I woke up with an intense cramp in each of my feet and my wife shouting, sotto voce,

“John, there’s a bear coming into the lean-to!”

I did an instant sit-up and found myself face to face with an enormous black bear, its nose perhaps a foot away from mine, its short, rapid, halitosic breaths instantly condensing on my nose, mustache, lips and cheeks. I ran my hands rapidly all over my chest, looking desperately for the whistle I had worn to sleep around my neck, when the bear suddenly lunged six inches forward and I let out some combination of a cry of pain, as the bear’s chest bent my feet unnaturally backwards, and a guttural growl as loud as my voice could go.

The bear’s ears went flat back against its head, it jerked its neck back away from me, jumped straight up in the air and performed an indescribable mid-air about face, hit the ground running and galloped into the woods. I felt the pounding of its footfalls right through the lean-to floor, followed shortly by the pounding of my heart.

A minute or so after waking up and remembering that too close bear encounter, I poked my head out of the sleeping bag and beheld a scene of absolutely mystical beauty. A day after full, a huge gibbous moon illuminated Johns Brook like a bank of Klieg lights, turning three huge branches of a maple overhanging the stream into a stunning blast of chartreuse. The intensely lit blast of leaves reminded me of a tight flock of small, white and light gray shorebirds flying low over a black swath of ocean—illusioned by the dense, impenetrable stand of conifers immediately beyond them, invisible in the darkness of their own shadows.

The boulders piled higgledy-piggledy up and down the brook, looking at once ashen and luminous in the moonlight, some small as walnuts, some big as Volkswagen Beetles, seemed like some wild profusion of prehistoric eggs, unhatched low these ten millennia since the glaciers laid them here. The brook itself, visible only as a widely scattered field of sparkles, rather like broken shards of glass among the boulders, sounded like a full-house theater crowd, chattering excitedly a moment before the lights dim a few times and a cacophony of widely scattered coughs and throat-clearings sputters into silence.

As I wondered at the otherworldly beauty of the spectrally-lit brook and the stygian darknesses on either side of it, I realized I had been hearing a Swainson’s thrush singing for the past minute or so, and by the time I processed the thought I heard a robin, a little closer, start singing in counterpoint. Despite my ursine fears, I smiled, only to hear, closer still, a winter wren explode into song, filling the tableau with its cataracts of pure sweet notes. And then I heard an ovenbird, closer still, burst into high-volume song as a blue-headed vireo, no more than fifty feet from the lean-to, started rehearsing its call-and-response tune.

The insessorial serenade enchanted me so completely I forgot about all of my fears, and I can’t remember, for the life of me, laying my head back down on my pillow.